


my spirit that addresses your spirit

by midrashic



Category: Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 21:09:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15276234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: It was winter again when Josie Pye dared Anne to walk the schoolhouse roof.





	my spirit that addresses your spirit

**Author's Note:**

> For I.

It was winter again when Josie Pye dared Anne to walk the schoolhouse roof.

A terrible cold had seemingly consigned all the boys of Avonlea to their beds, and the girls had grown accordingly wilder and more rambunctious in their absence. Jane Andrews, who normally spent class daydreaming and doodling in the margins of her speller, had turned into a positive devil as if to make up for her brother’s absence. Miss Stacy was accordingly hard pressed to keep a class of fewer than half her usual number of pupils under control. She shooed them out into the cold in lunchtime with an unusual vigor, locking the schoolroom behind them to keep them outside and, therefore, no longer her problem.

Later, no one would be quite sure how it started. Someone dared Jane Andrews to cross the thinly-frozen stream by the schoolhouse, and instead of turning away, she had hiked up her skirts and done it. The next thing anyone knew Diana and Josie were standing on their lunch pails on one foot and trying to outlast the other. Josie smiled, self-satisfied, when Diana tumbled off and landed heavily on her backside only moments into the competition. “No guesses for who won’t be winning a contest of grace,” she sneered.

Diana was scarcely acquainted with indignity, so splayed on the frozen ground, rubbing her hip, her hair in disarray and her cheeks pinked with the cold, Anne was unsurprised to see a tremor on her lips and a certain shakiness in her hands. She was, however, furious. “You take that back, Josie Pye,” she said fiercely.

“As if you could do any better,” she sniffed.

“I could! I could beat you in any contest you chose.”

“My mother says pride is a sin,” Ruby Gillis whispered behind her. Anne ignored her. So did Josie.

“Could you,” she said, and the light that meant she had come up with a truly wicked idea came into her eye. “Then I dare you to walk—the schoolhouse roof.”

“What?”

“You heard me. If you get up onto the roof and walk its length, I’ll eat my words and admit that you’re more the more graceful of the two of us. If you don’t, you’re admitting that I excel you at all things. Especially ladylike things.”

Anne surveyed the roof apprehensively. The schoolhouse wasn’t terribly tall, but a fall from the roof wouldn’t be like jumping floors with Jerry at the hayloft, with miles and miles of fresh hay to cushion any fall. She understood, grimly, that Josie Pye was trying to kill her. Still. She stood and dusted her dress off with determination. Even Josie had fallen silent, as if Anne’s temerity had shocked all the spite out of her.

Diana tugged on her sleeve. She looked even paler than she had when she had fallen. “Anne,” she said, “it’s not worth it.”

“It’s a matter of honor,” Anne said. “Mine and yours.” She plotted a path with her eyes—the window, the ledge, the shingles. “If I die,” she added magnanimously, “you can have my brooch.”

“I don’t want your brooch! Anne—”

But the wind stole away the rest of Diana’s admonishment. As for Anne, she was already at the wooden frame of a window, judging where to place her foot for maximum stability.

She hoisted herself up by leveraging the nearby woodpile. Once she got her feet on the ledge, it didn’t seem such an insurmountable prospect. Rather like climbing a tree, really, she thought cheerfully, and reached up to the gutter, clinging to it with both hands as she stepped onto the top of the wooden window frame.

Below her, the girls had settled into a deathly hush, as if they were watching something extraordinary, or holding vigil at a deathbed. Anne ignored them and got her hands on the roof. With a Herculean effort, she clambered up, knees first, then the rest of her body, until she was crouched warily on the snow-slick shingles of the schoolhouse roof. She summoned up all her courage and stood. Five open-mouthed faces goggled at her from the ground.

She waved. From up here, the whole of Avonlea seemed to roll out endlessly before her. The woods, which seemed so thick and occasionally foreboding when she was among the trees, revealed the truth of their scattered and motley selves. Far in the distance, almost obscured by winter mist, she could see the Brannans’ farm, and the dark line where it bordered the Winstons’ homestead. All around her, the lush white-grey of snow, blanketing and disguising all the life that lay underneath until the summer thaw. She shimmered with its beauty.

“It’s really not so bad,” she called down. “It’s not as frightening as it—”

She took a step and her world tilted sideways.

In her reverie she’d forgotten about the ice crusted under the shingles and had moved carelessly, her boots slipping, losing traction on the roof’s surface. Her eyes flew wide open. She didn’t scream—that would have been impractical—instead she scrabbled at the roof with her mitten-clad fingers and managed to direct her tumble into more of a controlled slide. She almost— _almost_ —arrested her fall and shut Josie Pye up for the rest of her days. Instead, her grip on the edge splintered, and she flew off the roof, into the air for a dizzying, exhilarating second, and then into the ground.

The frozen soil hit her like a body blow. Dazed, Anne didn’t connect the searing, throbbing pain in her ankle to the exposed bone and blood until her head had settled back into position.

Anne bit her lip. She would _not_ scream. Though pain like nothing she had ever felt before—not when Hammonds had been beating her, not when she had knelt for hours on the cold asylum floor balancing pillow and a stack of books—radiated through her, she was not a child any more and she _would not_ scream.

“Anne!” Diana screamed on her behalf. In a flash—or perhaps more, time was still a bit funny for her—Diana was hunched over her, hands fluttering around Anne’s leg as though she could will her cuts closed and her bruises gone. “Anne, say something. Anne, Anne, are you all right?”

Ruby’s and Jane’s faces swam above her. Anne shook her head hazily, not sure if she trusted herself to open her mouth. Diana moaned fearfully. Her fluttering became even more urgent.

“Move. Move!”

The crowd parted. The absolute last face she wanted to see in her humiliation appeared hazily in front of her. Of course Gilbert Blythe would have the good fortune to escape the influenza which had downed half the upper class.

Gilbert had missed most of the excitement; he spent most of the lunch periods these days inside, hunched over his books, in an ostentatious display of academic effort that Anne would match if she had need of the extra studying in order to equal his scores. He had, however, heard a clamor on the roof and then a colossal crash, and the moment he had gone outside and seen a knot of terrified girls, had known that Anne was to blame. He knelt over the mess of her ankle, unwinding his scarf from around his neck.

“We need to bind it,” he said. “Jane, get a long, thin piece of wood from the firewood stack. Diana, send for the doctor. Ruby, find Miss Stacy.” And like that, her crowd of on-lookers and hovering angels dispersed, leaving her and Gilbert kneeling the snow. “It’ll be all right, Anne,” he said in his most comforting, doctorly voice, and something about Anne’s expression must’ve communicated what she thought about that, because he smiled wanly. “What?” he said. “No scathing retort?”

Gilbert Blythe, I am just afraid that if I open my mouth I might split your eardrums, Anne thought at him. He didn’t seem to get the message. A laugh crinkled his eyes. “That’s a first.”

Anne ground her teeth. _I’ll show you first—!_

But then Jane was back and he was doing something that looked terrible and felt worse to her ankle, and when he lifted his head away her leg was, more or less, in one piece. He held the board against her calf and wound his scarf tightly around her leg and foot. With his free hand, he traced calming circles in the patch of bare skin where her stockings had ripped. She would never tell him how stupidly grateful that tiny, comforting gesture made her feel.

“How do you know all of this, anyway?” she asked when the pain had gone down some and she thought she could breathe without holding back a scream again.

He pinked. “I’ve been apprenticing for Dr. Ward in Charlottetown after school. Two afternoons a week. A lady came in last month after a riding accident. Dr. Ward showed me how to bind and staunch broken bones.” He peeked at her through his fringe. “Lucky for you.”

“Lucky for me,” she said, and was surprised to find she meant it.  
  


Dr. Gordon, when he came, commended Gilbert on his quick thinking and spend quite a lot of time tsking at Anne for risky behavior. By the time he finally sent her home with a wooden crutch and a stern admonishment, she was ready to bite his head off.

“Oh my word!” Marilla screeched when she saw the state of her, and firmly ensconced Anne in Matthew’s room downstairs for a week until she could hobble, more or less successfully, around Green Gables on her crutch. Anne suspected she sent her back to school as much to regain the peace of her house as because Anne was ready for it.

Anne, instead of sitting on the floor with the rest of the class, was confined to the chair for visitors (and Gilbert, when he came in early for extra tutoring) at the front of the classroom, gloomily watching as Miss Stacy made astonishing chemical reactions happen and mathematical equations pop from the worst vantage point in the room. And when Billy Andrews returned and heard what she had gotten herself into, she knew he would never let her hear the end of it. But the worst part of being an invalid—the very worst part—was lunchtime.

She could no longer sit cross-legged with the girls wherever they decided to park themselves; she had to resort to eating alone at one of the spare desks pushed to the wall that had survived Miss Stacy’s purge. Diana, faithful as ever, visited her regularly, but by the time the boys returned and re-colonized the classroom, even she was gasping for a breath of fresh air every now and then, and never stayed long. So it was Anne, foot sullenly propped up on a bench, and Gilbert, and very occasionally Miss Stacy, who tended to spend her lunch periods outside supervising to prevent a repeat of Anne’s unfortunate incident. Just a room. With her. And Gilbert Blythe. She waited for the awkwardness that lingered around the two of them to descend at any moment, like a lurking bird of prey. But, even worse, Gilbert was determined to talk it away.

He asked after Marilla, which she couldn’t avoid answering and which led her into inquiring after Bash’s and Mary’s health; he waited with an eager ear for whatever story she had about how she had managed to most recently get into trouble while on a crutch. It was as though he could see the black mood that had settled over her, isolated from her friends, trapped in the at times airless prison of the classroom, and wanted to—what? Comfort her? The thought was absurd, but remained uncomfortably true-feeling.

In February, he soundly defeated her at a math problem on the board. She stayed stubbornly quiet throughout his regular lunchtime chatter, until he finally said, “Looks like I’ll have to tutor you if I ever want you to talk to me again.”

She scowled. “Tutor _me?_ I’ll have you know, Gilbert Blythe, that I could teach you things you couldn’t even imagine.”

Gilbert laughed. There was a note of discomfort in it. Anne looked him over warily. “Maths is so unromantical,” she added. “All hard numbers, reducing the wild beauty of the world to cold lines and unfeeling equations. Give me a subject with letters any day.”

“There are letters in math,” Gilbert said wryly. “As, Bs, Cs. Es.”

“There are not Es in math.”

“It’s true!” He proffered his book to her, then, at her thunderous frown, stepped away from his lunch to let her take a look. In Gilbert’s neat cursive—and all right, so he had her beat at penmanship, that wasn’t a _real_ subject—was a complicated-looking series of swirls and Xs and, yes, Es. “Calculus,” he said to the look she gave him. “Miss Stacy’s been teaching me before class. For the medical school entrance exams.”

As if she needed something to put her in a worse mood. She turned back to her tinned stew, if anything feeling even more disinclined to talk to Gilbert than before. He seemed to sense her simmering anger. “Aw, Anne, talk to me. It’s awfully boring when you refuse to liven up the place.”

She ignored him stonily. “At least let me check your ankle?” he tried. This piqued her interest and Anne agreed begrudgingly, if only to heal all the faster and be back outside in the chill February air romping with her friends, among whose number she most decidedly did not count Gilbert Blythe.

He helped her set her foot on the bench and gently, with a tenderness she had heretofore not suspected he was capable of, undid her bandages. She flushed when he took a clinical eye to the knot of scar tissue and lumpy bone resting just under the skin. He lifted a finger and for a moment she thought he was going to run it down her sutures, but instead he paused right above them, so close Anne could feel the ghost of his touch. “Healing nicely,” he said. “No infection. That’s good.”

“Do you actually know what you’re doing, or do you just say medical-sounding things and hope no one questions you about it?” she said grumpily.

He gently redressed her ankle and set her foot back on the floor, like soothing a skittish horse, handling a precious artifact. “You got me,” he smiled. She scowled and tried to pretend she wasn’t smiling back.  
  


It became something of a habit, after that. Even after the sutures came out, Gilbert would, at intervals known only to himself, ask nicely to see if he could check up on Anne’s ankle and spend a few minutes inspecting the gash where the bone had come out of the skin and testing her range of motion. It was on one of these occasions, after a little light talk about the upcoming planting, that Anne, to distract herself from her foot in Gilbert’s lap, asked why he wanted to become a doctor.

“I don’t know. Why do you want to be a teacher?”

“So I can be just like Miss Stacy,” she said promptly. 

Gilbert smirked, but, his avenue of attack cut off so quickly, fell silent for a moment. “I think I’d be good at it, is all.”

“That’s not an answer,” Anne said impatiently. “I’d be good at lots of things, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do all of them. In fact, many people would say that I lack the fundamental patience for my chosen vocation. Being good at something is not a reason to pursue it wholeheartedly.”

Gilbert looked out the window for a long time. At last he said, “There was a woman.”

Anne felt a hot spike of—something, like a flash in the pan. But Gilbert was carrying on, “She was having a baby. In Trinidad. Her baby was breech, but I—I saved her. Me and Bash did, together. And the way she looked at her child… I thought, I did that. It was what I hated about Avonlea, you know. Everything we do here seems so small compared to the great, huge world lying out there.”

“That,” Anne said loftily, “is because you have a fundamental lack of imagination.”

Gilbert cracked a smile. “Maybe. But here, I had to—I had to watch my father die. And there was nothing I could do to help him. And for the first time, I thought I saw a way I didn’t have to just sit and watch terrible things happen. I could stop bad things. I could deliver breech babies. I could help people.”

In the slanting sunlight falling through the window, Anne thought all at once, Gilbert looked very handsome.

He turned back to her. He was smiling, all trace of the seriousness of their conversation wiped from his face. “Does my reason meet your approval, Your Highness?”

“I’ll allow it,” she said, and he laughed.  
  


“Sweet bread,” he said, and offered her a slice.

She eyed the crumbling loaf. Gilbert flushed. “Bash made it. It’s coconut sweet bread. A ship came in at Charlottetown, and I—well. Try some.”

More enthusiastic now that she knew this was a gift from Bash, not from Gilbert, whose baking skills she didn’t entirely trust, she put a morsel in her mouth. Something sweet and mellow burst in her mouth. Gilbert laughed at her expression of surprise.

“It’s good, Gil!”

He cocked an eyebrow. It looked infuriatingly good on him. “Gil?”

She flushed, her detestable complexion at work again. She bruised like a peach, burned in the sun, and turned red at the drop of a hatpin. “Gilbert,” she corrected herself. “Of course. Gilbert.”

He turned back to his reader, but an infuriating smile was playing around his lips that she longed to smack off his mouth. Anne busied herself with her apple and spoke no more the rest of the day.  
  


In March, she could put most of her weight on her foot again. She still kept the crutch, as it was easier to swing herself around than to limp painstakingly over every branch and rock, but she could, she considered, rejoin the girls outside. She didn’t, though. She continued to eat lunch with Gilbert, and his warm hands checking over her ankle, and his intrusive questions and irritating laugh. Her increasing mobility came with a price, though.

After twenty minutes of watching her grimace and rub at her calf, Gilbert finally sighed and said, “Give me your ankle.”

What are you going to do about it, she wanted to complain, but after months of listening to that voice about her ankle, it was almost reflexive to lever up her leg and place her foot in his lap. He rolled up her stocking and began to rub at the strained muscle of her calf and foot. Anne shivered, briefly ticklish, but Gilbert’s touch on her skin soon melted into something warm and soothing. The pain began to drain away from her.

“How did you learn to do that?”

“Pumping coal is hard business. You learn to loosen up the muscles.”

She let him work in silence. It had been a particularly hard-fought victory over him in this year’s spelling bee. He had gotten “engagement” this time, but stumbled over “felicitous.” 

“Congratulations on the spelling bee,” he said at last.

“Why do you think we’re always fighting, Gilbert?” she asked the question that had been niggling at her for the past three months.

“We’re competitive people. We both want to be the best.”

She shook her head slowly. “You don’t think it’s possible for people to compete and be friends?”

His hands paused on her ankle. “Do you _want_ to be friends?”

“I…” she thought about Gilbert over the last few months, his solicitousness, his sense of humor, and was surprised to find that the answer was _yes_. “Maybe. Why? Do you?”

Gilbert looked at her. Outside, the spring flowers were beginning to bloom. This was probably the last week they would spend together before school let out for planting, and for some reason it seemed momentous, important, that they clear the air. The scent of marsh marigolds and baneberries hung like heavy perfume in the air.

Gilbert Blythe leaned in and kissed her.

For all the ruminating she had done about the nature of kissing, she had not been prepared. A simple touch of mouth to mouth shook her, sliced like lightning down to her core. Gilbert smelled like woodsmoke and the air after an electrical charge. He tasted like fire and heat and light, blinding light. She stood, frozen, as he drew back, and made a soft sound, a sound that wounded her heart like he had pierced her through.

“Yes,” he said, “I’d like to be friends.”

He got up and slipped out the door. He left his books, and Anne, behind. She licked her lips; she could still taste him, like a lingering trace of summer on the tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> Come [tumble with me.](http://midrashic.tumblr.com) If you like my work, buy me a coffee.


End file.
